Francis Gano Benedict (1870-1957)A chemist, Benedict rose to prominence
when he assisted Atwater in the Department of Chemistry at Wesleyan University.
Over a 12-year period, they conducted over 500 experiments concerning
rest, exercise, and diet using the Atwater-Rosa respiration calorimeter.
Their results appeared in six bulletins of the Office of Experiment Stations
of the U.S. Department of Agriculture under the general title Experiments
on the Metabolism of Matter and Energy in the Human Body. In addition,
Benedict published studies on the physiological action of alcohol (which
proved to be controversial and opposed by the temperance organizations)
and the effects of muscular exercise and mental effort on energy metabolism.
When Atwater died in 1907, Benedict became Director of the Nutrition Laboratory
in Boston, a post he held for 30 years until retirement.

Relocating from Wesleyan to Boston provided Benedict with ready access
to outstanding medical facilities. His work in respiratory metabolism
complemented that of scientists in allied health fields such as renowned
endocrinologist Elliot P. Joslin, who worked on diabetes (Joslin,
1912). Benedict studied metabolism in newborn infants, growing children
and adolescents, starving people, athletes and vegetarians; he also
investigated the effects of diet, temperature regulation, and exercise
on metabolism. Traveling to Christian Bohr's laboratory in Copenhagen
in 1907, he met August Krogh
who won the 1920 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The next summer,
Benedict accompanied Krogh to Greenland to measure excretion of Eskimos.
(Schmidt-Nielsen,1995)

Original bicycle ergometer used in Benedict's experiments
to assess exercise energy metabolism in the early 1900s.

In 1919, Harris and Benedict published their influential "metabolic
standards" tables based on sex, age, height, and weight to compare normals
and patients. In addition, Benedict published extensively in animal
and agricultural nutrition. Collaborative research with E. C. Ritzman,
University of New Hampshire at Durham, determined fat and carbohydrate
usage relative to energy metabolism from the smallest mouse to an 1800-kg
elephant. By modifying the respiratory apparatus, Benedict could accommodate
lizards, turtles, birds, and snakes. His last monograph on basal metabolism
refers to many of his approximately 400 publications (Benedict,
1938). Maynard (1969) chronicles Benedict's
accomplishments, and a biography (DuBois and Riddle,1958)
lists 300 of his publications. However, Benedict's work was not without
detractors. Kleiber (1973) disparaged Benedict's
method for expressing metabolic rate in wild and domesticated animals.